By Bruce Pollock | Executive Director
First, I want to thank the 62 individuals that contributed $6,500 to FREE Partnerships during the April GlobalGiving challenge. This funding enabled us to recruit over 100 new volunteers for the seven FREE Partnerships schools in Rochester. These volunteers include 87 college students:
These colleges, as well as SUNY Geneseo, will continue to provide college student volunteers for FREE Partnerships schools every semester. This is a win-win relationship: college students get fieldwork hours to satisfy their course requirements and Rochester elementary students get 1:1 support to help them succeed in school.
More exciting news: FREE Partnerships has collaborated with the Rochester Police Department (RPD) to bring 15 police officers into Rochester schools to work with kids on their reading. Each of the FREE Partnerships schools has at least one officer who will come to the school each week to work with students. This RPD program will help students with their reading and allow students to see RPD officers as supportive, friendly, and helpful. Now that’s a win-win relationship too!
While FREE Partnerships has recruited over 100 new volunteers, the community – school partnerships at each school have also been recruiting volunteers. With these combined efforts, the FREE Partnerships schools had almost 300 volunteers in March and April, providing over 1,000 hours of support per week for the students in these schools. Now that’s impressive!
So does all of this support matter? Let’s let the teachers who have FREE volunteers tell you about their experience! Watch the video, produced during the FREE Partnerships – Ford Motor Company “Start More Than a Car” marketing campaign, and see how much the School 52 teachers appreciate the support they get from their volunteers.
This is a win-win-win relationship: teachers get more support, students get more support, and FREE volunteers help Rochester schools provide a better education! FREE Partnerships is all about finding winning relationships to improve education outcomes in Rochester public schools.
As you know, Rochester students took the 2011 State English Language Arts (ELA) exam and Math exam in May. I’ll send you another report by the end of August with the results from those exams to let you know how the students in the FREE Partnerships schools did.
Thanks again for your support! We couldn’t do this without you!
Links:
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
